Manchin Makes It Official

Now that they control Congress, although by the barest of margins, the Democrats can do considerable damage. But for their long dreamt-of power grab–adding more states, packing the Supreme Court, institutionalizing electoral fraud–they need to break the filibuster.

Ending the filibuster would require the votes of all 50 Democratic senators. That has always seemed unlikely, and yesterday Joe Manchin made it official in an op-ed in a local newspaper. Manchin said that he will not vote for H.R. 1, the Universal Voter Fraud Act, nor will he vote to end the filibuster:

Democrats in Congress have proposed a sweeping election reform bill called the For the People Act. This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support.
***
The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.

With that in mind, some Democrats have again proposed eliminating the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass the For the People Act with only Democratic support. They’ve attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.

As a reminder, just four short years ago, in 2017 when Republicans held control of the White House and Congress, President Donald Trump was publicly urging Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster. Then, it was Senate Democrats who were proudly defending the filibuster. Thirty-three Senate Democrats penned a letter to Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warning of the perils of eliminating the filibuster.

I don’t think Kyrsten Sinema would have voted to end the filibuster either, but now it is official. Unless something changes dramatically, it appears that the Democrats’ most grandiose dreams are dead for the time being.

STEVE adds: Yes, this is all to the good, but we should keep a basic rule of leftist politics in mind: they play the long game. As Michael Walsh correctly says, “They never stop, they never quit, they never sleep.” These bad ideas—DC and PR statehood, ending filibuster, federalizing election fraud—are now baseline “progressive” priorities, and they will certainly come up again at some future moment, perhaps when Democrats have 53 Senate seats and a Joe Manchin is powerless to stop them. This is certain to happen, unless. . . .